To reduce the labor costs involved in producing various types of garments, many garment manufacturers now employ complicated and expensive automatic sewing devices, such as the automated pocket setter currently being used to attach the rear pockets to blue jeans. These automatic pocket setters move the pocket and the blue jean body portion along paths of travel extending at various angles relative to the vertically reciprocal needle of a sewing machine to produce multidirectional seams around the sides of the blue jean pocket. If the multidirectional seams produced by a particular type of sewing thread include an objectionable number of defects, the garment manufacturer will use the automatic pocket setter to test other types of sewing threads to determine the best type of sewing thread to use in this particular type of sewing operation.
In order to obtain meaningful results, it is often times necessary to seam a large number of pockets to the corresponding body portions of the blue jeans with several different types of sewing threads. This testing procedure requires that the automatic pocket setter be out of normal production for an extended period of time. Also, a large number of pockets and body sections must be provided to carry out this type of sewing thread testing operation under actual production conditions, thereby wasting many expensive pockets and blue jean body portions. Testing the sewing characteristics of sewing thread by actually sewing large numbers of pockets on the automatic pocket setter also takes a great amount of time to determine the type of sewing thread which produces the best results.